You're much better off not trying to prevent the user from typing in too many characters and instead showing a counter and only enforcing the character limit when the user tries to submit. The comment boxes Stack Overflow are a decent example. It's both easier technically and more importantly better for the user to do it this way: it's really irritating not to be able to type/paste/drag text into a textarea even if you know there's a character limit.

Edit It appears that maxlength for a textarea works in Chrome, but not in other browsers, my bad. Well, another approach would just be to monitor keydown events and if length>150, return false/preventDefault/however you want to stop the default action. You'd still want allow backspace and enter however, so monitor keycode as well.